It is christmas time (again), and the freesound team has prepared a present for you…
We have been working on a new functionality* which has just been deployed, and that will allow you to followfreesound users and get notifications when these users upload new sounds! But not only that, you’ll also be able to follow groups of tags, and be notified when new sounds are uploaded that have these tags. It all works in the following way:

When visiting a user profile, you’ll find a “Follow” button right under the user avatar. Click on this button to start following that user.

When browsing sounds by tags, you’ll find a “Follow tags” button under the group of tags that you selected for browsing. By clicking this button, you’ll start following sounds tagged with all of these tags.

In your settings page, you can tick the new checkbox that says “Receive weekly stream update email notifications” to turn on notifications for new sounds uploaded by the users you follow or with the tags you follow. We will only send youone email per week, with a summary of all updates, and we are only going to send that email if there are updates.

Once you start following users and tags, you can use your new activity stream page to show all updates from users and tags you follow. By default this page shows updates for the last week (just like the email notification), but you can also specify other periods of time and, for example, list sounds uploaded by the users you follow that were uploaded during the last month. You’ll find a link to the activity stream in your home page.

Hmmm.. that is all! We hope you enjoy this new functionality and, as always, please tell us if you find things that are not working as expected!

keep on Freesounding!

* thanks to nunoh who joined the team for a while and did most of the implementation of this functionality

]]>http://blog.freesound.org/?feed=rss2&p=5323CCMixter needs your helphttp://blog.freesound.org/?p=528
http://blog.freesound.org/?p=528#commentsMon, 17 Nov 2014 06:42:41 +0000http://blog.freesound.org/?p=528Continue reading →]]>CCMixter, one of the first open platforms for Creative Commons music sharing out there is in trouble. The site was started by Creative Commons themselves many years ago, but understandably “let go” because Creative Commons is a legal organisation, not a music publishing one! Now CCMixter needs your help.

About 5 years ago the main creator and developer -good friend of freesound.org!- had to move on to other things in life and the site was taking over by new management. Not wanting to turn the site into a commercial venture, CCMixter was kept on life support for as long as possible. A heap of volunteers are keeping the site up, but lately it is becoming too much work for the volunteers to keep up with the work. This is mostly due to some much needed development work.

CCMixter is now doing an indiegogo campaign to raise some funds for better hosting and development work – we thought you might want to know about this…

Sometimes I promote the Freesound Dares (our friendly competitions) here on the main page. But sometimes I forget…
So, I am trying to make up for it, because this dare is definitely worth promoting.

This time the dare is not about samples at all. It is about recognizing, helping and encouraging free-software developers.
In particular, the developer of an android app called UFXLoops. – Don’t let the name fool you. This app is actually a DAW powerfull enough to allow you to build a complete music piece.
Interested?
Full details of the dare are here:

some of you will already know that as part of our research towards improving Freesound, we’ve been working on a tag recommendation system for Freesound. The goal of this system is to make it easier for you to tag your sounds and at the same time to try to get more comprehensive sound descriptions. The better the sounds are described, the better Freesound will be

One year ago we opened an online experiment to evaluate the tag recommendation system that is currently implemented in Freesound. Your participation and feedback was very helpful, and since then we’ve been working on a new version which includes some radical changes that we think will be very useful. For that reason, we are opening now a new online experiment in which we want to compare the new system with the one currently implemented in Freesound.

The new experiment is called Freesound tagging experiment 2, and in it you’ll have to annotate a total of 15 sounds. In the experiment, not all of the participants will be using the new interface to annotate these sounds, so don’t be surprised if you only see the typical tag recommendation interface. After the experiment is finished, we will deploy a beta-testing version of the new interface so those who could not try it this time, will be able to do it later.

We kindly ask you to participate in the new experiment that we have set up at http://labs.freesound.org/tagrecommendation/. Please carefully read the instructions and follow all steps until the experiment is finished. It will take around 20 minutes.

So that is all for the moment, thank you very very very much in advance for your participation. I hope you find the experiment interesting!

we’re happy to announce that today we are officially releasing a new api for Freesound, APIv2!

The new api enables developers to make better applications that make use of Freesound content. APIv2 brings many improvements over the previous version such as the possibility to upload sounds or to define queries combining sound metadata and audio descriptors. For more information on whats new, you can check the api documentation here.

Let’s see what developers do with the new api!!!

keep on Freesounding!

]]>http://blog.freesound.org/?feed=rss2&p=5110Issues with HTTPShttp://blog.freesound.org/?p=500
http://blog.freesound.org/?p=500#commentsFri, 07 Mar 2014 18:06:13 +0000http://blog.freesound.org/?p=500Continue reading →]]>Recently (about a month ago) we have added https to our web server. This was a requirement for the new v2 API, but it also allows us to browse the page securely. You can tell if you are using https by checking the icon at the left of the address bar.

Unfortunately there have been some issues with the transition that took us some time to catch. One possible reason is that it took some time for google to start directing people to the https version of the site.

- Registration. The captcha was not appearing when using https. Thus you could never prove you are a human even if you are. Should be fixed now.

With respect to 503 and 504 errors mentioned in the previous post, we are still working on it, but it’s looking good. We hope to restore the packs browsing page next week.

Happy freesounding!

]]>http://blog.freesound.org/?feed=rss2&p=5000Experiencing some turbulencehttp://blog.freesound.org/?p=486
http://blog.freesound.org/?p=486#commentsMon, 24 Feb 2014 20:58:44 +0000http://blog.freesound.org/?p=486Continue reading →]]>Hi. As you are probably noticing, the site is working intermittently at the moment, with 503 and 504 errors appearing often. We haven’t been able to find the source yet. We’ll update this post as we get a clearer idea by tomorrow morning (CET). Hopefully it should improve in the mean time as traffic slows down … bear with us!

UPDATE 1: There seems to be a problem with a recent upgrade of the search server. Things seem to work normally again after a restart, but it could still come back…

UPDATE 2: After reconfiguring the search server the worst part seems to be passed. We are still looking at some connection problems. Pages may still take a bit to load some times, but most of the time the site seems to run fine.

UPDATE 3: In the end the most serious problems were not related to the search server, but to some of our database queries. We are still working on that, but in the mean time you may have noticed we have disabled the link to the page for browsing packs. That helped us to put the situation under control. It will be back very soon.

UPDATE 4: The “browse packs” page is back online and optimized so that it does not create problems again.

we added a small new feature to facilitate the way in which you add and remove sounds from your packs. Say welcome to the “Edit Pack” page!

Just like when editing sounds information, you can now click on the “edit pack information” link that you’ll find in your pack pages and use the new interface to edit name, description and add/remove sounds from the pack.

today we’ve added a small new feature that should help those of you uploading sounds. We added a new page called “Uploaded sounds awaiting moderation” to make it easier to keep track of the moderation status of your newly uploaded sounds. Once your sounds are uploaded, described and processed, you’ll see an indicator in the header of Freesound named ‘uploads’, with the number of sounds you have in moderation stage. This indicator is not visible when you have no sounds in moderation stage, or when your newly uploaded sounds have not been processed yet. By clicking at this indicator you’ll be directed to a page with the list of your sounds pending moderation and with links to the moderation ticket, to the edit page for the sound, and with a shinny warning indicating when a moderator added a comment regarding your sound and is awaiting your response.